News The Kafka Effect

[anthony]

This is a very interesting read... stick with the beginning, as you will get to the matter at hand after first understanding preliminary matters:

A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by psychologists Samantha Heintzelman and Laura King of the University of Missouri sheds light on this curious phenomenon. In a series of correlational studies and experiments, Heintzelman and King found that when people believed their lives made sense, they let their intuitionguide their actions. But during times when they didn’t feel life was as meaningful, their brains shifted gears. “Before a trauma,” Heintzelman and King write, “a person was likely on auto-pilot, relying on intuitive processing. However, after a traumatic event, effortful processing may be crucial to making or reinstating meaning.”

It works like this: When we detect something that doesn’t make sense—when the spouse we rely on to be our rock suddenly starts flaking out, or the neighbor in the Kafka story acts like a horse for no discernible reason—a cluster of brain functions called the salience network immediately activates a powerful set of cognitive skills that go to work finding other meaningful patterns around us. Once it starts, your brain won’t stop looking until it finds something to fill the void in meaning.

If your brain can’t find a good reason to explain why your partner is being a jerk or why Mr. Brown is licking a salt block, it will start looking elsewhere—with extraordinary intensity and ability. It will identify unrelated patterns and connections between ideas and objects that were probably right in front of us all along, but that we just never noticed.


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[Fadeaway]

Interesting take. It is interesting because I have always felt a lot of connection to his characters and saw him as an author that "gets it." The Trial was more frightening to me than any Stephan King novel. The whole "How do I defend myself, when I don't know what I am defending myself against that comes with the hypervigilance, anxiety and emotional flashbacks."

 

[UnKnown-Self]

I can remember pretty early on as a tween trying to make sense why things were the way they were. Besides the "it's all you deserve". While that was/is there, the only other thing that ever made sense was to help others.

 

[Anarchy]

That's exactly what my mind did when I was about 7 years old.

there was so much unpredictable shit going on that I found omens which predicted it:

See only one magpie on the way to school or get forced to eat custard,

and I knew with absolute certainty that there was big shit heading my way, and that the only questions were what the shit was going to be and when would it hit.

I've got rid of the magpies, but well over forty years later, I still have difficulty with anything that remotely resembles custard.